FOREX

One of the irritating things about being deeply in debt is dealing with your creditors. Happily, if your creditor is, say Wells Fargo, they tend to stay within strict legal bounds when dealing with you. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to seek credit from fellows whose last names end in vowels, they tend to be more…forceful in delivering their messages to you. As it happens one of the United States’ creditors also has a name that ends with a vowel: China.

And they have a message. The more or less official organ of the Chinese Communist Party—which is to say the Chinese Government—is the newspaper People’s Daily. So, it is with much interest that I read an op/ed piece in that fine journal with the title, "China must punish US for Taiwan arm sales with ‘financial weapon’". As messages go, this one’s pretty simple.

Now is the time for China to use its "financial weapon" to teach the United States a lesson if it moves forward with a plan to sale arms to Taiwan. In fact, China has never wanted to use its holdings of U.S. debt as a weapon. It is the United States that is forcing it to do so.

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a debt ceiling bill on Aug. 1. On the next day, a total of 181 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter sent to U.S. President Barack Obama stating that the federal government should approve the sale of F-16 C/D fighter jets to Taiwan as soon as possible to help ensure peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait…

Despite knowing that major creditor countries, especially China, would be the main buyers of its new debt, certain arrogant and disrespectful U.S. Congress members have totally ignored China’s core interests by pressuring the president to sell advanced jets and even an arms upgrade package to Taiwan.

U.S. treasuries will lose value if China stops or reduces its purchases of them on a large scale, which will also affect the value of China’s U.S. treasury holdings. However,as the situation has gotten out of hand, allowing Washington politicians to continue their game might lead to more losses.

U.S. arms sales to Taiwan can only create more jobs for the United States but cannot improve the ability of Taiwan’s military force to compete with the Chinese mainland. The essence of the problem is that some U.S. Congress members hold a contemptuous attitude toward the core interests of China, which shows that they will never respect China. China-U.S. relations will always be constrained by these people and will continue along a roller coaster pattern if China does not beat them until they feel the pain.

I am mildly amused by the claim that such sales both threaten "China’s core interests", but "cannot improve the ability of Taiwan’s military force to compete with the Chinese mainland." Both of these arguments cannot simultaneously be true.

Less amusing is the common attitude of loan sharks to their creditors displayed here using much the same language that Tony "The Shark" would use: Namely, if creditors don’t do what they’re told, you have to "beat them until they feel the pain."

With the recent rise in bond prices and drop in yields, the Chinese have a number of options. The least damaging to the US would be to sit out a few bond auctions, which would force interest rates up. But they’ve also got the nuclear option of selling off as much paper as the market could bear. Yes, they’d forego some yield payments, but they’d probably make a nice tidy premium over the original purchase price to make up for it. Rising interest rates now, at a time when the economy is weak, and short-term rates are already effectively zero, would slow the US economy. At the same time, a massive repatriation of renminbi to China would cause a steep drop in the value of the dollar in foreign exchange markets. This would raise the price of imports equally steeply. This would cause something very similar to the oil price shocks of the 1970s, that plunged the US into stagflation.

Naturally, the Chinese would be hurt by the reduction in their export capability. The question then becomes, "Which of the two political systems, China or the US, is more concerned about democratic pressure to change policy in order to improve the economy?" Who is more responsive to public pressure: our government, or the government that initiated the Tiananmen Square massacre?

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t expect Hu "The Kommissar" Jintao to be the one that blinks first.

Of course, if we weren’t $14 trillion in debt, we wouldn’t be very vulnerable to this sort of thing.

Following yesterday’s announcement that Greek debt was downgraded to junk status, today Spain’s debt was downgraded as well. Spain is, in many ways the bellwether for Europe’s debt crisis. Spain has a much larger economy than Greece. So large, in fact, that it may be too big to bail out.

Fortunately, Spain’s debt is still less than 60% of GDP; however, the country is on a reckless fiscal path and the government shows no signs of doing anything about it.

As a result of the growing crisis, the Euro is getting hammered in the FOREX market, while the dollar is soaring. This is, in effect, an interest rate hike for US businesses that export to the Euro zone.

Naturally, this places downward pressure on US export sales at a time where the overall business climate is still weak. So, none of this is good news for the American economy, either.